- Production Directories
- Location Scouting
- Tech Scouting
- Scheduling
- Call Sheets
- Release Forms and Contracts
- Digitizing Dead Trees
- A Quick Word About Budgeting
A Quick Word About Budgeting
When I was building the outline for this book (using the insanely awesome OmniOutliner for iPad, by the way), I had hoped to include a big fat section on film-budgeting apps.
As a director, I usually leave the budgeting to someone else, but I felt it was a topic that belonged in the book. Plus, I recalled using at least one or two decent film-budgeting apps in the past. As it turns out, one of those apps is no longer available in the App Store, and the other was, in fact, total crap. Sadly, as of today, there are no film-budgeting apps I can comfortably recommend.
Don’t fret! There are several terrific, high-quality film-budgeting applications available for your Mac or Windows machine (Movie Magic Budgeting, anyone?). If you truly want to budget your flick on an iOS device, take a look at Apple’s Numbers. It’s a dirt-cheap, surprisingly powerful spreadsheet app available for iPad, iPhone, and the Mac.
Creating a movie budget from scratch is madness, especially when there are several decent film budgeting templates floating around the interweb. Do a Google search for Free Excel Film Budget Template, and you should find a few options. Fortunately, Numbers can import most Excel documents without too much fuss.
In case you have a rare reading condition that forces you to gloss over adjectives, I’d like to point out that I just used the word decent to describe those templates. They are most definitely not awesome, and none of them will replace the feature set of a dedicated film-budgeting application.
The moment someone releases a good iOS film-budgeting app, rest assured I’ll be yapping about it on HandHeldHollywood.com.